This week we’re starting with the abstract artist Emily Thornton who has spent the last two years working in Zambia and is now living in a new world of sewing face masks for Government hospitals, rumours around lockdown and fruitful studio living.

ARTIST IN FOCUS: EMILY THORNTON 

Emily Thornton moved to Zambia in 2018 and is now happily settled living near Lusaka.  Having been teaching once a week at the local school, Emily now spends two days a week sewing face masks for the Government hospitals. Within a community of 60 others, they have already made 10,000 face masks and are set on making another 10,000 more. The rest of her time is spent back in her studio where Emily lives and works looking out over the Zambian bush.  
 

Emily’s paintings are led by emotion and her work is charged with memories and feelings drawn directly from the landscape. It is this depth of feeling that radiates through her paintings, as each piece sets out to reaffirm that ‘people’s experiences of landscapes, emotions and memories are entirely connected.’

Being surrounded by the colour, light and intensity of the African seasons, ‘Zambia has given me the space to reconnect with myself.’  It has been a journey of acceptance where, away from the noise of London, ‘there is time to think, to know myself and understand what matters.’

At the heart of all Emily's painting is also an ‘obsession with colour and the need to discover new ways to express balance and tone.’ There is a constant quest to explore how each colour reacts and interacts with each other. ‘Often a single anomalous element of colour, found nowhere else in the painting, can anchor the equilibrium of an entire composition.’

Recently working on a larger scale has also brought an ever greater sense of freedom. 'Bigger canvases mean bigger brushes, physically it’s more demanding working around the canvas and there is more energy, more movement and expression.’